Load Forecasting Initiative
Load forecasting is key for many grid decisions across operational and planning timescales. This means that improving the forecasts can lead to improved outcomes, such as more efficient investment decisions and grid performance. However, load forecasting is becoming more complicated due to drivers such as electrification, extreme weather, changing customer behaviors and more. At the same time, these drivers are contributing to increased forecast uncertainty. There is therefore a need to evolve load forecasting and address the critical needs that exist across the industry.
The following three Load Forecasting Initiative workstreams aim to address these critical needs:
- Industry Coordination
- Long-Term Forecasting for Planning
- Short-Term Forecasting for Operations
Utility Experiences and Trends Regarding Data Centers: 2024 Survey
Providing power for data centers (DC) is a growing challenge for the electric power industry, both due to the load growth from DCs in aggregate and the increasing power demand of individual DCs related to cloud and artificial intelligence applications (for example, training large language models). Despite many anecdotal reports on DC development, there is limited broadscale information available regarding utility interconnection requests and how utilities analyze and review these requests. This report summarizes a survey conducted in May–July 2024 to assess present utility DC service requests, processing and analysis of those requests, and integration into load forecasting. The results highlight shared challenges regarding powering DCs and the need for industry-wide collaboration.
Load Forecasting for Planning Timescales: 2024 Survey
Load forecasting is essential for a range of decisions and applications across planning timescales. However, there can be significant differences in load forecasting approaches across—and within—organizations. This document summarizes the results of a 2024 industry survey regarding current forecasting practices and gaps for planning timescales, with responses from transmission and distribution utilities from the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) Quick Insight
Weather forecasts are increasingly important for power system operations. The most common sources of weather forecasts are numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. This Quick Insight provides an overview of the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS), a next-generation NWP model from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for providing weather forecasts across North America.